Strangelove

The first player-owned Titan was built, attributed to the Ascendant Frontier Alliance (AFA, Eve-Online). On October 1st it was reported that AFA's Titan deployed the first hostile doomsday device seen in said game world. It's use appears to have been miscalculated and the weapon inadvertently destroyed a great number of the AFA fleet.

Wry remark aside, this event begs at least three questions.

1.) Has there ever been a comparable mass-casualty weapon used in an MMOG by a player against other players? Disqualified are the inadvertent misadventures, e.g. Virus!

2.) How many times can one use a doomsday weapon in an MMOG before it ceases to be one?

3.) While this doomsday event is tiny compared to what Kubrick humored (~60? versus "Now I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed, but I am saying no more than 10 to 20 million killed. Tops!") is it still a notable game design accomplishment (all those players contributing those resources for... *bang*) or is it just derivative (Dragon raid anyone)?

Comments

Oh, and ASCN claims that the firing was a test and the ASCN ships destroyed were the equivalent of the fake towns blown up in 50's A-Bomb tests, since this is the first Titan fielded on the live server, they wanted to be sure the big gun worked.

As part of Aetolia's opening plot, a player managed to create a magical firestorm that destroyed everything (player and NPC) in one of the major city-states in Achaea by unleashing a one-time doomsday weapon.

A hell of an interesting drama took place afterwards in which much of the game demanded that the player who unleashed the weapon be put on trial for crimes against humanity, while the city-state that the player who set it off was a member of defended her. I actually cannot remember the outcome, but recall it being a fascinating experience.

Friendly fire losses by ASCN were planned losses. The Titan - especially the Doomsday weapon - is still buggy and does not operate as announced by CCP. ASCN is still finding out what it REALLY can and cannot do.

About MMORPG mass destruction weapons :

Player groups bringing "The Plague" out of a high level WoW instance into Ironforge and other large cities seems to qualify as MMORPG MWD in my opinion. There have been days were the skeletons of deceased players covered the whole ground in Ironforge wherever you looked. Anyone logging in was dead within seconds.

>>>>There are rumors going around that another major Alliance already has a Titan and has had one for a month or more. Probably unfounded (all of them), but hey – who knows?>>>>

A Developer from CCP named this the first Titan ever build in a thread on EVE-O forum and also in an "official" EVE message on log-in screen. Several other groups ("BoB" alliance etc.) have claimed to own 1-2 Titans build in secret - which was debunked as propaganda by the dev message.

1) PlanetSide, while not strictly an MMO has an 'Orbital Strike' doomsday weapon of a sort. A large beam of energy, supposedly launched from orbiting space stations, hits the battle area and destroys anything and anyone in about a 20m radius or so, no saving throws, no survivors. The only defense is to start running when you hear the charge up noise, and hope you get far enough out before it hits. A very different scale than EVE's, of course, but has a similar impact on the game dynamics, totally removing all enemy forces from one particular area at the press of a button. (It too, damages friendlies if aimed wrong.)

2) Being hit by my first ever one was a jaw-dropping thing, but since the ability is given out as part of a squad-leading xp-based levelling system, in which it is impossible to ever *lose* xp, most longer-time players now have this ability - perhaps 30-50% of the population? (A guess) Despite it being limited per-player to once every three hours, there are no global limits on them, and nowadays it's not uncommon to see four or five of these going off in the space of twenty minutes, falling like angry rain, and eventually, you develop a kind of shrugging fatalism to them, and just bounce back up and carry on regardless. Tactically useful, but *far* less majestic than they once were.

I suspect the sheer number of CR5 commanders that would end up with access to the ability was severely under-estimated during PlanetSide's initial design, as in almost all other situations presented by the game, there are very few 'one-hit deaths' where the victim didn't have *any* course of action to respond with, even if it is just running away.

Despite the costs and efforts involved, I wonder if EVE Online is ultimately in for the same sort of devalueing re the Doomsday Devices there?

A major difference in EVE is that since it's a mass casualty ship, and since you lose all of your ship and ship's equipment (minus insurance), it's a tangible loss. It's a true doomsday weapon in that what is lost cannot be recovered, though it can be replaced with time and effort.

That said, Titans in EVE have very restrictive limitations that make it improbable you'll see them in combat. They're also massive investments in time and isk (tens of billions of isk, months of time) so losing one would be a huge blow to whichever alliance fields it. You'll see a lot of caution in its combat.

It's good to know the propaganda of Eve's wars reaches this far, but this is quite inaccurate. IIRC a grand total of 7 people were killed by the weapon, 4 hostile to ASCN and 3 friendly. 2 of the friendlies were cloaked (invisible) at the time the device was used and no one knew they were there.

For comparison fleet battles routinely kill 20-30 people and last minutes. It's a doomsday weapon in name and in theory, but in practice it still has to prove itself.

One question: Why the hail would you test a doomsday device on fake ships in a VW? Why not test it against some less important enemy installation? In RL, the tests of nukes are because of physical issues, detonations that won't work, new discoveries, etc. etc. Is EVE (I haven't played, so please forgive the ignorance) really so realistic a model that you have to test your physics?

If so... wow. That's cool in the extreme. But I still think I'd favor testing the thing in the middle of my enemies' company picnic.

Stanley Kubrick did not "hypothesize" a doomsday device, they actually existed. His fiction was creating a scenario where it could seem reasonable to use them, knowing you would lose "10 or 20 million, tops." Is virtual reality imitating art, here?

The number of people killed and direct damage caused is likely to remain pretty insignificant until ASCN reach their goal of building 2 or 3 of them. At the moment, a hardened battleship can reasonably easily tank the damage dealt by the Titan. It cost ASCN 160 billion isk and 9 months to build the thing, an investment that they are unikely to recoup in destroyed enemy ships. It will be a useful POS defense weapon, and might wipe out the odd support fleet, but you won't be able to conquer an entire region on the military strength of the Titan alone.

The real strength of the Titan is that it forces your oponent to fight differently if he knows that a doomsday device could be fielded against him. It also provides a common goal for ASCN to work towards and achieve, much like their outpost constructing efforts did. This is the sort of thing that binds large alliances with thousands of people together and keeps them strong, doing more good than any superweapon on a battlefield could.

The reasoning behind the test-firing looks like they weren't sure if the doomsday weapon effects were fully coded- I don't know too much about EVE, so it's even possible that the proper usage of even fully-functioning weapons may not be apparent without a little real-world testing,rather than just documentation. I certainly wouldn't want to get into a battle, push the big red button, and have the only effect be a little flag popping out that reads "Working as Intended."

Even if ASCN will not recoup the cost of the Titan (yes it's really really huge) by destroyed enemy ships the construction and deployment still has an impact, as pointed out by Boogaloo. I think it has been a big moral boost for ASCN members and a cause for envy from it's rivals, which ultimately might have led to war (I'm not into the alliance politics that much). But time will tell if it was wise to invest all effort and ISK into building a Titan, or if other strategies will prove superior. If nothing else the use of the weapon makes it very clear what war is about - making individual sacrifices, many times forced upon you, for a higher goal.

You'd risk losing the Titan without/before learning its actual capabilities. With an investment that huge, I can understand the reluctance to commit it to "real" battle before its abilities are understood. Wouldn't want some upstart in a newb ship to fly into the reactor shaft... no, wait, different, err, world(s).

1) I considered that WoW bug from last year a sort of Doomsday weapon. A Warlock would bring a pet to Molten Core, have it get hit with a DoT bomb (from Boss Geddon I believe), leave the instance, hit a major hub (like Ironforge Auction House), resummon the pet that still had the DoT and just let the bomb go off. It did 3200 damage to everyone in the area. I believe it only worked on PvP servers. Lasted about a week :)

There's also that old rumour that in EQ and DAoC one could type a special sequence of letters and numbers and force everyone in the area to go linkdead. Rarely substantiated though.

2) Days if it's a bug :)

3) The bugs are exceptions but the player created ones seem generally to be little more than the usual mass grind.

at some time in the game there was a serious problem with Jedi lightsabers. If you wrote a macro to equip, switch on, switch off, unequip, repeat 50 times (which takes only a few seconds) everyone around you went link dead, including you.

Well .. guess what happened in PvP ? Suicider ran into the middle of an enemy group and ran their macro. BANG. 50 people link dead.

The buddies of the Kamikaze - waiting some distance away on speeder bikes - came in and killed everyone in sight.

Why is that a WMD , you ask ? Well ... given the current number of players in game since the NGE patch killing 50 people IS mass destruction.

Have fun

Erillion

PS:

One reason for the loss of cloaked friendly ships in the ASCN Titan test was the requirement to find out if cloaked ships are affected by the Doomsday blast. You cannot rely on the description of the weapon that CCP has published. As a previous poster has mentioned : Unless you test fire it in several situations to find out if the effects are properly coded already, you dont risk a 200 billion device (thats some 170 for building it and another 30 for fitting with special modules).

And I agree .. such projects give focus to alliances of 5000 players.

About motherships ... in recent CCP sponsored PvP tournaments alliance had motherships as prices. Some of the motherships mentioned in previous posts were won, not build. But believe me, if you are a cynofield pilot to create jump portals for capital ships .. and instead of a carrier you see a mothership crafted by the alliance coming out of your portal, which goes on and on, dwarfing your battleship, you get a sense of pride and achievement. Especially when the enemy fleet of two dozen ships or more suddenly runs like hell for the warpgates.

South Park just had an episode (trailer and two longer videoclips) about a doomsday device of sorts in WoW: an uber geek who played non-stop since release, allowing him to kill even admins :), defeatable only with a magic sword hidden away on a pendrive. Awesome episode.

Perhaps! I know on watching that I wanted to a.) see more machinima stuff (but we can chalk that up to my, and I guess our bias :), and b.) get my interactive TV on and help make the show.

I thought WoW really looked great on there, and on reflection it's partly because South Park is so simple looking. On taking the "jumping the shark" idea further, I don't think sharks get jumped as much as batons get passed to something else. Did South Park just surrender to its new virtual worlds overlords? What is SP but a highly edited virtual world with TeamSpeak? ;)

When I thought South Park sort of jumped the shark is when they started making fun of Family Guy, like what is becoming popular is not really funny people, we still are!! I remember feeling that then.

But, not to think around it, yes WoW on SP was an awesome episode, ha!

I suggest you do a little more research before you make an article like the Eve titan one. for one it's ASCN not AFA, the doomsday weapon can be fired once an hour but takes a large quantity of consumable fuel. the reason the Enemy fleet was barely scratched was because they were offgrid (which is difficult to tell) only some of their support was on the same grid as the doomsday explosion.The shear cost of building a titan and the amount of logistics that go behind it are huge, 160 billion isk for ASCN, hundreds of hours of hauling and transporting large sums of minerals. which is roughly 20 thousand dollars american on ebay.

20 thousand dollars . for 1 ship.... in a game.... which can be easily destroyed by a small fleet of battleships if the titan did not have support.

Also its not much of a doomsday weapon in my opinion any properly fitted battleship, t2 cruiser will survive the blast. only frigates, destroyers and tech1 frigates will be destroyed.

Goonies - although I dont support their basic principles (swamp an MMORPG with newbies and smack talk like their aint no tomorrow)- have a valid tactic in EVE.

Although they have been killed by the thousands by BoB - which has sworn to wipe em out to the last ship - they are still alive and kicking. It has helped that the Goonies not really had an 0.0 territory to defend. They just got killed in cheap ships and/or withdrew into empire space for NPC missions til BoB got bored.

I agree that in EVE the biggest threat to any large entity is boredom - without sufficient wars to fight/titans to build etc. an alliance will fall apart.

With regards to Goonfleet: they really aren't any more than an NPC station alliance now. Their attempt to remove D2 from XZH and Cloud Ring failed. Then they were removed from S-U and Syndicate by BoB with little or no resistance. They were the flavour of the month over the summer, and I think that the number of threads about them on the forums and the prolific posting of their members wasn’t really proportional to their ingame strength and influence.

Most importantly, their attitude to the game, the community and life in general was pretty appalling. A lot of their problems can be traced to the insufferable arrogance and idiocy of their leader Remedial read his big ‘let’s bubble up XZH for 100 hours’ speech for good evidence of this). It was hatred of him that made people go after his alliance with such determination, where otherwise they might have left it alone. Clear evidence of cheating (illegal account sharing for logistics, modifying ingame portraits to give warning of hostiles in system – the EVE equivalent of using wall hacks in an FPS), along with their smacktalking, as noted by Erillion, didn’t do much for their reputation either. Remedial himself has admitted that he gave his newer members ‘free’ cheap ships, in return for the high end minerals they mined which were worth many times more than the ships, using the isk he obtained to buy timecards.

Goonfleet are now reduced to hiding behind larger powers and using mercenaries to fight for them, and are unlikely to ever regain their old position.

In my opinion, a terrible leader and bad attitude capable of turning a large portion of the stronger alliances against you will do far more damage to you than any superweapon.

The titan is alive and well. ASCN have been using it near the front line - its ability to serve as a mobile base is immense.

It's not really designed for a head to head slug fest. A fleet of dreads back by carriers and motherships would tear it to shreads - something BoB could easily do if the thing got pinned down - hard to do when it can create its own jump gates.

At the moment though, it hasn't provided much support for ASCN. BoB are tearing them to pieces at the moment in the south. Should be interesting to see what happens if BoB start to get serious in ASCN home turf..

The node deaths are tearing fleets to pieces at the moment. Watching a black screen for 10 min during re-log-in, while 80 battleships are killed without anything you can do as you cannot target, cannot move, cannot activate any modules, cannot even SEE. CCP servers really fall apart during this war. The nodes die even though numbers are lower than in previous engagements in EVE in the last years. Seems CCP hardware is at its limits at the moment.

Interesting enough the battles are on BoB soil, because ASCN invaded the invader :-) Ships can be replaced, but empires and territory are harder to replace.

So ... here is another ULTIMATE MWD in MMORPGs. Server crashes galore.

1. "Doomsday device" isn't an accurate description of a WMD unless it's capable of offing a significant (25% - 50% or more) percentage of the population.

2. What gives WMDs their power isn't just the destructive capability of one weapon -- it's the threat that where there's one, there may be many more.

It was to generate this perception that two bombs were dropped in 1945, rather than just one. One could be a fluke; two implies a repeatable process, which is far more dangerous than any individual weapon (unless it really is a doomsday device).

3. The power of WMDs is not in their power to destroy military assets, but in their political effects on civilian populations. In other words, WMDs are a strategic weapon, not a tactical weapon. To think of them only as tactical weapons is to fail to get full value from the time and money spent building them.

4. A big difference between using WMDs in the real world and using them in online games is that most (pretty much all?) online games don't have anything like civilian populations. There may be a few NPCs, but that's nothing like the tens of millions of souls that general serious economic and political power. A few hundred NPCs who act only as isolated loot pinatas are not even remotely similar to millions of NPCs coordinating their actions in ways that have real effects on gameplay.

One of the ideas I've been mulling over for a MMORPG is to integrate it with a sim game. Part of the gameplay would be managing the political, economic, and social happiness of billions of simulated citizens spread over several worlds.

Wouldn't a game world like that be a lot more conducive to the application of a WMD? A WMD in one of the current player-heavy MMORPGs gets used more like a tactical weapon; it just kills (temporarily) a few players. As VanHemlock observed, eventually players just shrug that off.

It's when keeping millions of civilians happy matters that the possibility of some Bad Guys having a WMD becomes a real gameplay motivator. WMDs can only realize their full terrifying potential in an online world where WMDs can be a strategic-level threat.

Not exactly related to WMD in MMORPGs, but related to EVE and worth a read and a smile :

----------------------------------------------

Determination of a discrete unit for the measurement of smack talk

By: Culmen

Smack continues to be a staple of the eve community. However studies into the causes
and effects of smack has thus far been limited by an inability to quantify smack in a
discrete and scientific manner. While there have been studys on a subjective determination
of smack (Allen et al 2003). These determinations are not scaleable, and are unable to
cope with levels of smack occasionally seen in game. A recent study conducted by Jerkov
at al in 2005 has attempted a similar scale, but fails to differenciate smack by side, instead
measuring the overall content of smack in the entire local channel. Thus I have compiled a
scientific study in the hopes of better understanding the phenomenon of smack talk in a
quantifiable manner.

Methods
A comprehensive study of local chat logs in 9 regions of eve corresponding to 300 engagements
of various sizes (mean: 11.3 SD 43) and numerical status (mean ratio; 2.2:1 SD: 1.3) all chat log
were volunteered from a random sampling of pilots from these regions (87 subjects)

Coding
Coders consisted of 4 individuals who had nothing better to do. They were instructed to review
the chat logs for content that was A) posted in the presence of hostiles B) not related to the
organization of a defensive
2 coders were rejected due to excessive alcohol intake, and have not been included above

Results
Study indicates that there was a mean of 20 lines of smack per 5 minute interval (SD 7) with a roughly
equal amount of smack produced by both sides when aggregated. Per incident ratio ranges from .1 to 4
This is the basis for the determination of the unit for smack.

Discusssion: The determination of the “Local” unit
A unit of one local is defined as the average amount of smack produced by one side per 5 minutes of
engagement, measured in lines, and posted in local chat. This measurement is decimalized. Thus 1 line of
smack would approximate 1 mili-local, and a particularly smacky line might have a value of 2 mili-locals
Excessive amounts of smack may result in smack values of several kilo-locals (culmen et al 2005 “smack of burn eden”)
This does not include private convos or eve mails

This unit is applicable for forum threads, so for example a rational discussion on the eve-o fora would measure
several mili-locals, whereas a flame war might result in readings in excess of 3-5 kilo-locals up to 1 mega-local.

Extreme forum examples
There are cases where the smack in a forum thread exceeds the capabilities of this system to express the amount
of smack present in a thread in a concise manner. These threads often exceed 500 mega-locals (5e7 locals) thus I
have also created the BTU or BoB Thread Unit, to supplement this scale. Often this will be given in a fraction of BTUs
most threads never exceeding .3 BTUs, but occasionally a thread will rank 2 BTUs or more and example being
ASCN Vs Bob and co. Incidentally this scale has a .9 correlation between BTU and proportion of responsive flaming,
thus proving this scale usefulness for the study of smack.
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